For students and parents already groaning under the weight of paying for higher education, the news that tuition at colleges and universities across the country will almost inevitably be higher has been sending shock waves through public and private institutions alike.

Even before the final budgets for most state institutions are set by the legislature, a painful trend has been emerging: according to The Associated Press, California's proposed budget would raise state university fees by about 10 percent; Florida's governor is looking to increase each individual school's power to raise tuition; and the State University of New York has already announced an unusual midyear 14-percent increase.

The panic over higher than expected tuition increases compounded with the release of a report this week saying that most college students are paying more for their education, even as their schools spend less on teaching them.


"The public's got it exactly right," Jane Wellman, head of the Delta Project, told Inside HigherEd. "They are jacking up tuition, and they're not re-investing it in quality."

The Delta Project's trends held true mostly for public universities, but also found that private university educations--and the higher spending on instruction that goes along with it--is clustered in the hands of a much smaller number of students.

Though many private universities have not yet announced their tuition figures for next year, those schools that have announced show no indication of letting up on the trend of raising tuition. On Thursday, Washington University in St. Louis announced a 4.4 percent increase and last week saw the announcement of a 6 percent increase at Southern Methodist University.

The Delta Project report contains several telling pieces of information about how colleges and universities allocate the budgets afforded to them. Increases in spending were driven mostly by higher administration, maintenance, and student services costs and were financed largely by student contributions through tuition.

"The data tell us that the spending patterns are not changing, we're just shifting revenue sources," Wellman said. "So what this tells us is we're not dealing with our cost structures, we're just shifting revenues."

Based on the report's calculations, public universities spent almost $4,000 per student per year on administration, support, and maintenance in 2006, up more than 13 percent, in real terms over 1995. And they spent another $1,200 a year on services such as counseling, which was up 23 percent. Meanwhile, they spent about $8,700 a year on classroom instruction for each student, up about 9 percent.

Bright Hall explores the far-reaching effects of the financial crisis on the youth and campuses of America. Click here for the full series.